Grandfather guilty in infant's rape, murder

Willie Allmon listens to testimony in his first-degree murder trial Monday, October 25, 2010. Photo by MARK REIS, THE GAZETTE

A Widefield man will spend the rest of his life in prison after a jury Wednesday found him guilty of the rape and murder of his 8-month-old grandson.

A jury of nine-men and three women took about 9½ hours over two days to find Willie B. Allmon guilty on all charges, including first and second degree murder and sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust.

Allmon, a 52-year-old registered sex offender, will face a mandatory punishment of life in prison without parole when 4th Judicial District Judge Barney Iuppa sentences him on Dec. 2 for killing Isiah Melik Wilson.

While Allmon showed no emotion as Iuppa read the jury’s verdict, the child’s mother Felicia Allmon and her mother both bent over in their front row seats and began to weep.

Brenda Allmon, who had divorced her husband, later hugged her daughter and said, “I may be a hard mom. But I’m a good mom, a mom and a dad.”

They declined to talk after the verdict.

Felicia Allmon’s disagreements with her mother led her to stay at her father’s house in May 2009 after she and her father had been estranged for several years. On the morning of May 18, 2009, she left Isiah in his grandfather’s care. An hour later, he called to say the boy wasn’t breathing.

Doctors later determined that Isiah’s skull had been shattered and that he had been sexually assaulted. The child died the next day.

Jury foreman Zach Blea said the jury agreed to convict Allmon on the murder counts within 2 hours after the trial ended. It took them longer to reach consensus on the sex assault charge.

Blea said the jurors screened out the turmoil and drama of the Allmons family life and focused instead on the medical testimony.

“It really came down to the injuries and how they occurred,” he said.

The verdict came after the jury heard nine days of often graphic and emotional testimony.

They saw Felicia Allmon break down and cry several times on the witness stand, including when she was asked to identify her father in the courtroom.

Allmon’s public defenders suggested that Felicia Allmon could have inflicted the multiple blows that fractured her son’s skull.

They described the stressful, unsettled life she was leading after breaking up with Isiah’s father, an Army sergeant based at Fort Hood in Texas. They also cited her fears about losing Isiah to a custody battle with the father.

But prosecutors reminded the jurors of medical witnesses who testified that the fatal injuries probably occurred within an hour before Isiah was admitted to Memorial Hospital.

Jurors also watched a three-hour video in which Allmon struggled to provide an explanation for boy’s injuries. They also saw him grow angry and speak of himself in the third-person when El Paso County sheriff’s Detective Bill Otto confronted Allmon with the child sex assault allegation.

Allmon, a former Army sergeant, previously was convicted of a 1998 misdemeanor sex offense.

For video and more on this story, visit “The Sidebar” blog at gazette.com

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